Our first acai bowls

Have you tasted the deliciousness of an acai bowl? Haley has been wanting to try acai bowls for a while now so we decided to make some last week. Well before we could actually make them we went on a wild goose chase trying to find out where they sell frozen acai smoothie packs in Boston. We found them at our local Whole Foods and wiped them out of stock. On our first attempt, the acai bowl didn’t work. Basically we just put milk and an acai smoothie mix (frozen) into a food processor and couldn’t figure out why it was so liquidy… I mean obviously blending liquid with a liquid makes more liquid, but nothing seemed to work. We tried it a few more times and tried adding frozen fruit and whole bananas to try and help thicken it up but this still didn’t help. We were starting to think that maybe that’s just how they are supposed to be… But then this weekend we went to a place called Jugos in Boston to try some real acai bowls. We were skeptical because ours hadn’t been working. But low and behold they were amazing! They had all sorts of fun ingredients blended into them (including one we didn’t try with kale and spinach). We tried one with cashews blended in and loved it, so we decided to try that in our next attempt. Somehow with the cashews and a mixture of flaxseed and granola, the consistency was a bit thicker and the taste was delicious!

Ok, it could be prettier, but this was our first shot. We’ll perfect them and post more, but we wanted to post this because it was easier than we thought as soon as we had some basic ingredients to thicken up our acai soup from before.

Here’s what we used:

serves 1

1 frozen acai smoothie mix, we used Sambazon. They have both sweetened and unsweetened. (We used unsweetened — purchased from Whole Foods)

1 banana

8-10 chopped strawberries

1/2 cup milk of choice (we used So Delicious Coconut Milk, you can also use greek yogurt)

1) Blend the banana, strawberries, or any other fruit you want, with milk until almost smooth. Remove from blender.

2) Run the frozen acai smoothie mix under water for a few seconds until it melts enough to break it into chunks (don’t melt it all the way). Add the acai smoothie mix to the blender with a few spoonfuls of the fruit/milk mixture for more liquid. Blend until smooth.

3) Add flax, cashews, and cereal to the blender and add back the fruit/milk mix. At this step everything should be in the blender. If it doesn’t all fit, do it in chunks.

4) Pour mix into a bowl and top with anything you want! We topped ours with banana, strawberries, cashew butter and some more granola!

Give this recipe a try and comment what you topped yours with or any other suggestions on what to add to the mixture!